Screen House Residency: SunFest

I'm heading down to West Palm Beach for SunFest in an AmTrak train.

OK, now use your imagination...

You're on a train, you don't have to drive, you just have to look out the window. Out the right side of said train: flat-as-a-pancake land. In the distance, small collections of oak trees with tiny little mini palm trees surrounding them (in the industry, we call them palmettos). Out the left side: orange groves. Row after row of sweet delicious citrus (but that's usually in the winter season...). It's beautiful. Brings a tear to the eye.

Now, I must confess: not long ago I was living in a place pretty similar, except you'll need to substitute mini palm trees for...umm...grass. And get rid of those heavenly sugar-delivery systems we call fruit and put in the Backbone of the U S of A...corn.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm just saying I know what I like. And if you could have been on the train, pretending to smell the sweet swamp grasses and orange blossoms instead of the recycled stale air-conditioned air of the train, I tell you, you would agree that Florida Prairie is something to behold.

And don't get me started on the thunderstorms that sweep across land like that. You can see the lightning, but it's too far off to ever hear it. The rain gets to thick you can't see where the horizon stops or starts. (I think I may have gotten myself started, though.) Brings a tear to my eye and song to my breast. Ok, maybe not the song part. In fact, if it were to bring a song to my breast, the only song that seems fitting is "Shenandoah," and that's not even close to Florida. In fact, the one song that's a claim to fame would be "Way Down Yonder on the Swanee River," and unless I've only heard bad renditions of the song, it's not nearly soulful enough.

Can you inherit a song for any time and place?

Oh FL prairie

I long to see you

Away you rolling...swa-amp

Oh FL prairie

I long to see you

Away, I'm bound away

Across the wide

Okeechobee

So maybe it's not the same. But I think if the pioneers had started here instead of Virginia, I bet that song would have been a little different. I betcha they stole the original tune from Ponce de Leon.

Screen House Residency: Big Whoop

Some of you out there have heard stories of various animals wandering a little too close to studio spaces. I think my favorite of these stories regularly occurs at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN) where a bear likes to wander in and give the resident artists a good time. I can say that in Florida, I, too, have had an experience that equals in intensity. Yesterday, while dutifully working in the Screen House Residency of Crooked Lake, I had a close encounter with a pair of Florida Sandhill Cranes. These ferocious pack-hunting birds swooped out of nowhere, calling out with a warrior cry that had me hiding under my wedging table! I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of their razor-sharp beaks and sun-blotting wingspans. As if trapped in my own personal Jurassic Park, I ravenously searched of any kind of escape route!

Lucky for me, I had my trusty Kemper fettling knife to keep them at bay. Whew! It was a close call and I count myself fortunate to be have captured these pictures of such violent creatures with my ever-ready cell phone. Oh course, they are a little blurry (sound familiar my Loch Ness brethren?) so I've included a shot from the ever trustworthy World Wide Web (aka: the Information Super Highway, or Internet). Behold their terrifying red-masked faces of death! They are the scourge of Crooked Lake, a murderous flying brigade of bandits, hell-bent on the destroying the peace and solace of every hard working ceramic sculptor in the land!

Will the Lake ever again know harmony in the aftermath of such shrieking horror? Will this "endangered" species ever relent its hatred of foolish man? Stay tuned... and vigilant!

Screen House Residency

So here it is, Day 2 of the Screen House Residency. And it is awesome! I get up in the morning, have a little coffee with Mom and my bro and then head down to the screen house by the lake. I hop up to the house proper for a little lunch and then head back down the hill and make some more work. Of course, if I want to, I take a little dip in the lake, like I did with Dad today. We had a light banter about the state of the water flow and how it's affecting the shape of the beach shore. And then I went to work again. And as if that weren't enough, I had a wonderful dinner at the house and then headed back to the screen house for round...4? What a day!

I was asked today what I think about while I'm making my work. Pretty good question I'd say, coming from a family who hasn't ever really seen me when I'm in work mode. I rattled off a list of things that pass through my mind: the future, my family, relationships, aesthetics, concepts, etc. One other thing I have been dwelling on is how familiar this is to grad school. Wake up, make art, eat, sleep... Rinse, repeat. Something I learned from one of my grad professors (John Balistreri) was setting up a studio that makes sense for the work being made at the time. For example, if you're making large scale sculpture, you wouldn't take up valuable working space with one foot shelving units. Right now I'm employing this tactic as I make a new body of work and dealing with a long forgotten working environment. When I was a resident at the St Petersburg Clay Company I worked in a mostly outdoor environment. (For those of you at NCECA this year, that was long before they made the sweet renovations that put everybody in the air conditioning. Look at me, I'm starting to sound like an ole timer. We also walked to the studio uphill both ways and had to drudge through a sand pit to get there...) Anyway, after that, most of the residency or school situations I've been in have been climate controlled.

Until now. I'm working in a 10 x 20 ft screen house. One wall has windows but the other three are all screen. And we get a little bit of wind coming off the lake. That doesn't dry things out too fast though because we've got about 99% humidity. Which reminds men, we just entered rainy season.

Why does none of this bother me? Well, because maybe while I was in graduate school I learned that I could adapt my studio and studio practice to match whatever situation in which I might find myself. That's not a skill I thought I needed to learn as I entered grad school. Hey, I thought I had most of the figured out by then. But it just goes to show that sometimes we learn things when we least expect it. I assume that the Screen House Residency will provide more things to learn, things I couldn't possibly foresee at the present time. If that happens, you'll be sure to see it here.

PS: Thanks, JB.